Latencies can vary immensely (from 1s to 2 minutes) with an average of around 45s. Google Drive & the Google Drive File Stream service is mostly slow and sometimes very slow, it's unreliable with lots of synchronization issues. However, in spite of opportunities they have to improve, I have to admit their solution is very good.

I've identified lots of technical ways they can improve further and significantly reduce their infrastructure costs. Everything feels like it's happening in real time, and it just works, every time. Given latencies significantly impact user experience for products where people are collaborating, and as far as I can tell no one yet has publicly shared performance metrics of Dropbox vs Google from a latency perspective, I took it upon myself to compare the two products in a reasonably scientific and reproduceable way.Ībout me: Matthew O'Riordan, CEO & technical co-founder Ably Realtime Performance Dropboxĭropbox is reliably fast (typically 0.5 to 2s to sync a change across any medium). The reason we have a shared drive is almost entirely to discourage this behaviour, yet a poor user experience with Google Drive has been responsible for slowly changing behavior in our team. I've seen this first hand now as our team has progressively resorted to sharing files in other ways such as emailing files and sharing on Slack.

Whilst the liveness of content is certainly not the only factor in choosing the right cloud based drive solution, I believe that when an online service's user experience lets you down (unreliable sync, slow etc), then you can quickly lose trust in the product. Dropbox vs Google Drive - measuring realtime synchronization performanceįollowing a migration from Dropbox to Google Drive for my team at Ably Realtime in Jan 2018, I noticed following that migration that files were often out of sync and updates felt sluggish across the board.

One drive vs dropbox vs google drive